In the past 25 years, India and the United States have become closer than ever before, building strong economic and strategic ties. Their partnership has rested on shared values and shared interests: they are the two largest democracies in the world, home to vast multicultural populations, and both have been concerned about the rise of India’s northern neighbor, China. But in the past four months, that carefully cultivated relationship has abruptly gone off the rails. The return of U.S. President Donald Trump to the White House threatens to undo the achievements of a quarter century.
Trump’s actions have disregarded several of India’s core foreign policy concerns, crossing sensitive redlines that previous U.S. administrations tended to respect. The United States once treated India as an important American partner in Asia. Today, India faces the highest current U.S. tariff rate, of 50 percent—an ostensible punishment for India’s purchase of Russian oil after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. India finds itself dealing with a higher tariff rate than even China, the country that, at least until recently, Washington wanted New Delhi to help contain. Indeed, Trump seems far more keen to strike a deal with China than to relent on his tough stance toward India. And to make matters worse, Trump announced a deal in late July with India’s frequent adversary Pakistan, under which the United States will work to develop Pakistan’s oil reserves.
These tariff woes follow on the heels of another shock to the Indian system: Trump’s intervention in May in a clash between India and Pakistan. After a few days of escalating strikes precipitated by a terrorist massacre in India, Trump unilaterally announced that he had brokered a cease-fire between the two countries. India vehemently denied that claim—New Delhi has long resisted any external mediation of its disputes with Islamabad, and American officials have been careful not to offend Indian sensitivities in this area—but Trump doubled down. No doubt he was offended by Indian pushback, just as he was pleased by Pakistan’s immediate embrace of his claims and its eventual nomination of him for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Indian officials are seething, but they understand that anger is unlikely to work where reason has failed. For the moment, New Delhi has decided to wait out the storm, carefully wording its responses to try not to inflame the situation further while signaling to a domestic audience that it is not simply submitting to the White House. The implications of Trump’s bullying for India’s grand strategy are profound: Trump’s foreign policy has upended New Delhi’s key geopolitical assumptions and shaken the foundations of the U.S.-Indian partnership. India’s favored policy of “multialignment”—seeking friends everywhere while refusing to forge clear alliances—has proved to be ineffective. And yet Trump’s actions won’t encourage a great revision in Indian foreign policy. Instead, New Delhi will survey the shifting geopolitical landscape and likely decide that what it needs is more productive relationships, not fewer. To protect itself from the capriciousness of the Trump administration, India will not abandon multialignment but pursue it all the more forcefully.
TAKING IT FOR GRANTED
Since its independence, in 1947, India has mostly followed a policy of nonalignment, eschewing formal alliances and resisting being drawn into competing blocs. That posture largely defined its diplomacy during the Cold War but began to change after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when India opened its economy and pursued better relations with the United States. Now its foreign policy community stresses a commitment to multialignment, which consists of the diversification of partnerships, the refusal to join military alliances, the promotion of a multipolar world order in which no single superpower or pair of great powers is predominant, and a willingness to engage in issue-based cooperation with a wide variety of actors across geopolitical fault lines.
This policy is driven both by pragmatism and by the hope that India can serve as a pole in the order to come. Indian policymakers believed that the country’s economic, strategic, and military needs could not be fulfilled by a single partner or coalition. They assumed that India could maintain its ties, for instance, with the likes of Iran and Russia while still working closely with Israel and the United States, and while building coalitions in the so-called global South with countries such as Brazil and South Africa. New Delhi imagined that Washington, in particular, would tolerate this behavior because when it came to the competition with China and the geopolitical contest in the Indo-Pacific, India was indispensable.
India sees itself as a central player in Asia. Trump does not.
Trump’s return to the White House has rocked the foundations of India’s strategy and challenged New Delhi’s closely held assumptions. As American tariffs take effect, the Indian economy will face increasing headwinds, most likely slowing economic growth. American ties with Pakistan in the wake of the May military standoff seem to only be growing stronger. And India now feels increasingly dispensable and marginalized in a geopolitical landscape it can hardly recognize.
India’s strategy presumed a number of structural conditions that Trump has thrown into flux. India assumed, for good reason, that it played a crucial role in the great-power competition between the United States and its allies in one camp and China and Russia in the other. Pakistan seemed peripheral to this larger contest; Islamabad’s global standing had diminished after its security establishment facilitated the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan in 2021. Despite its refusal to condemn Russia for attacking Ukraine, India remained a favored partner for both the United States and Europe. After all, Washington’s perception of New Delhi as a potential regional counterweight to Beijing cemented India’s strategic value.
Russia’s war on Ukraine then provided India with a unique opportunity to demonstrate its policy of multialignment and raise its profile in global geopolitics. Russia, Ukraine, the United States, and Europe—key parties to the conflict—all courted India. In the process, India was able to maintain ties with both the United States and Europe, even as it bought Russian oil at favorable rates. And if the United States sometimes behaved in South Asia in ways that rankled India (for instance, when it did nothing to stop the ouster of a pro-India leader in Bangladesh in 2024), Indian officials still perceived American involvement in the region as largely beneficial, and confirmation that the United States saw the subcontinent as a key front in its larger competition with China. India much preferred the occasionally irritating involvement in South Asia of a faraway superpower to the aggression and ambition of the aspiring hegemon next door.
SHAKEN TO THE CORE
Trump’s return to the White House has complicated each of the assumptions New Delhi held. Instead of girding itself for great-power competition, the White House is scouring the world for short-term gains. Through that lens, Washington has much more to gain from China than it does from India; the war in Ukraine must end because supporting Ukraine is not worth American taxpayers’ money; and Europe’s problems with Russia are Europe’s problems, not those of the United States. In such a worldview, India’s geopolitical profile invariably shrinks.
Take the issue of the hour: the soaring tariff rate that Trump has imposed on India. Indian governments have traditionally maintained a high tariff structure to protect domestic manufacturing and agriculture, generate revenue, and manage trade balances. India has long justified these tariffs as essential for its developing economy, but the United States is unhappy about the persistent trade deficit in goods with India, agricultural subsidies that limit U.S. access to the Indian market, and India’s omnivorous geopolitical maneuvering, including its membership in the coalition of nonwestern countries known as BRICS and its continued reliance on Russian oil and defense equipment. Previous U.S. governments tended to overlook these infelicities, allowing India to liberalize its economy and decouple from Russia at its own pace. But this Trump administration is not so patient.
Washington’s revised approach to great-power competition has not only transformed its own policy toward New Delhi but has also influenced the choices and decisions of other major players—with significant implications for India. Russia, for instance, has sensed that Trump is far less committed to supporting Ukraine than was Biden, is less interested in the systemic challenge posed by China to the U.S.-led world order, and is reluctant to provide security commitments to allies in Europe and Asia. As Trump prepares for a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin this week, he seeks to punish India for buying Russian oil—a policy that the United States previously encouraged. With Trump in the White House, Russia has more options and needs India less.
America has much more to gain from China than it does from India.
Indeed, Moscow feels a diminishing obligation to New Delhi and is unwilling to offer more support than it receives, which explains its lukewarm backing during India’s clash with Pakistan in May. Russia’s public statements at the time were vague: they neither mentioned Pakistan by name nor endorsed India’s military reprisals, but simply called for settling disagreements diplomatically. In a sense, Russia echoed India’s own messaging after the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Nevertheless, the statements alarmed New Delhi’s Russia watchers, who expected the Kremlin to stand by India, condemn Pakistan, and affirm India’s right to retaliate—much as Israel did in its full-throated support for India. Indian analysts suspect that Russia refrained from doing so because it didn’t want to irritate China, which has become a close strategic partner of Pakistan and provided it with a great deal of new weaponry.
Going forward, Russia is likely to prioritize closer ties with China over its declining relationship with India. Sensing victory in Ukraine, Moscow has new priorities: it now seeks partners capable and willing to challenge the United States and Europe, not merely offering commercial relationships. China can do that, but India is only interested in trade. Russia may therefore be reluctant to support India in any future Indian-Pakistani conflict, owing to China’s ties with Pakistan. If Russian support for India is doubtful during a conflict with Pakistan, it’s safe to assume that Russia will do little to help India in any future conflict with China.
Trump’s relative indifference to South Asia will invariably mean a free pass for China, which will attempt to tilt the regional balance of power in its favor through a combination of debt-trap diplomacy, military agreements, and growing political and diplomatic ties with South Asian states. Chinese equipment and know-how strengthened Pakistan’s conventional capabilities in May and helped Pakistani forces probe Indian defenses. China is more directly involved in South Asian matters today than ever before and its defense industry will have a growing role in future military conflicts in the region. And if China can burrow even deeper into South Asia, it will have Trump to thank. The U.S. president is seeking a trade deal with China while trying to bully India into submission; he evinces little interest in the geopolitical fate of the Indo-Pacific, in general, and South Asia, in particular. This peculiar orientation in Trump’s foreign policy will help Beijing consolidate its influence in the region, invariably at India’s expense.
MORE OF THE SAME
The recent months of foreign policy setbacks reveal the inherent limitations of India’s commitment to multialignment. During the May clashes with Pakistan, most of India’s partners were more concerned about a potential nuclear exchange in South Asia—even if that remains extraordinarily unlikely—than interested in helping India diplomatically, politically, or militarily. But beyond the nuclear concerns, the response of India’s friends and partners was one of qualified neutrality. They echoed India’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. India’s position of not siding with either Russia or Ukraine, a stand born out of the policy of multialignment, didn’t satisfy either Russia or Western governments, and so nobody stood with India when it faced a crisis.
India imagined that it would benefit from great-power competition, maneuvering between China, Russia, and the United States to its own advantage. It worked until the dynamics of that competition changed dramatically. New Delhi saw itself as a central player in Asia. Trump has disabused Indian officials of that notion. His imposition of very high tariffs this month blindsided Indian policymakers who thought that the White House, in its own interest, would always treat India with due consideration. Trump seeks deals with China and Russia, browbeats traditional allies and friends, and seems content to speed the emergence of some kind of G-2 condominium in which the United States and China carve up the world between them. In such a world, India’s geopolitical importance declines dramatically.
This is not just India’s plight. The story in Europe and among American treaty allies in Asia is similar. In that shared doubt about the United States, however, lies a potential salve for India’s injured foreign policy. India could strengthen partnerships with European countries and major Asian powers, such as Japan and South Korea, who face their own balancing dilemmas because of the unreliability of the Trump administration. It could also seek to cultivate, or at least signal, closer ties to China and Russia; indeed, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi confirmed this month that Putin will visit India later this year.
To be sure, New Delhi views Washington’s conciliatory approach to Beijing with deep alarm. It has already begun considering how to better strengthen its defenses, source its weapons platforms, and establish reliable partnerships and supply chains. India will survive this geopolitical whirlwind with some deft diplomacy and patience, but this turbulent period is likely to have several long-term consequences for New Delhi’s foreign policy and strategic outlook. Bilateral relations between India and the United States will suffer acutely. Indeed, the domestic factors in the United States that appeared to guarantee good relations with India have not slowed their precipitous decline: the influential Indian diaspora in the United States seems powerless, the supposed bipartisan consensus in favor of India has not reined in Trump, and India-friendly politicians and industry leaders have remained conspicuously silent. After decades of abating, anti-Americanism is once again on the rise within the Indian foreign policy community. For an Indian foreign policy establishment that is doggedly consistent in its commitment to the status quo, Trump is a constant puzzle.
And yet, paradoxically, India’s response to its current predicament is likely to be, well, more of the same. The very inadequacies of multialignment may in fact push India to become only more multialigned. If Washington is not a viable or reliable partner, New Delhi will seek and cultivate other partnerships. Trump’s outreach to Beijing and Moscow will now prompt New Delhi to follow suit, reversing India’s earlier policy of gradually distancing itself from China and Russia. India’s policy of multialignment has just undergone a geopolitical stress test and emerged rather winded. But Indian policymakers are not concluding that they should abandon it; to the contrary, they will fortify it.
Loading…
Source link
